Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (review)

Imperial history sometimes appears to be dominated by binary distinctions: British and foreign, European and “native”, east and west, black and white, civilized and savage, tradition and modernity, resistance and collaboration, etc. These distinctions are rooted in historical experience and thus unavoidable when discussing the past. As every imperial historian knows, however, they have also been elevated into categories of analysis that threaten to obliterate the complexity of the past. Perhaps the most fundamental binary of all is the distinction between colonizer and colonized.

Tied to the imperial archive created by colonizers, most imperial historians approach their topics from one side of this binary, but not without endless frustration. If only we could tell both sides of the story, looking at a problem from the point of view of both colonizer and the colonized, and weaving the two into a unified story based on a thorough knowledge of the history and culture of both sides of the binary. There are a few admirable models of how this might be done, and J. D. Y. Peel’s book is one of them.

Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba belongs alongside the works of other anthropologists who have written some of the best works in imperial history: Jean and John Comaroff, Laura Stoler, Thomas Beidelmann, Marshall Sahlins, and Gananath Obeyesekere. Peel has done many years of anthropological field work among the Yoruba of southern Nigeria, but in this work he sets out to write as a historian, basing his research on the archives of the evangelical Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS). His goal is to explain why the overwhelming majority of the Yoruba people voluntarily abandoned their religion and adopted Christianity.

Peel’s choice of an archive would appear to place him among the imperial historians who begin their analyses from the point of view of the colonizers, but he makes claims about his sources that ultimately destabilize the binary distinction between colonizer and colonized. The Victorian CMS was controlled by obsessive bureaucrats who required all CMS agents to document their daily activities and report them to headquarters in London. Most CMS agents among the Yoruba were not white Europeans but black Yoruba Christians, working for white European missionaries, but agents in their own right with a considerable degree of autonomy. They wrote detailed diaries of their daily activities, which are now deposited in the vast CMS archive at Birmingham University.

On which side of the binary do these black agents of the CMS belong? Are they collaborators in the destruction of their own indigenous culture, as secular Nigerian nationalists such as Wole Soyinka assert, and therefore on the colonizing side? Are they early practitioners of a genuine, indigenous African Christianity, independent of its western roots, as church historians such as Lamin Sanneh assert? Peel resolutely refuses to put his documents, or the agents who wrote them, on either side of the binary. The most important thing about these Yoruba Christians, he argues, was not their status as carriers of western culture, or their status as shapers of an indigenous African Christianity. It was instead the fact that they were Christians, self-conscious participants in a trans-national world religion.

Peel does not attempt to ignore the categories of European and African, which were important to the people he is studying. He does attempt to prevent these categories from obliterating the complexity of the past. His primary interest is in the way in which educated Yoruba Christians shaped a new historical narrative that integrated Christianity into the history of the Yoruba, and the Yoruba into the history of Christianity. CMS agents and clergy not only wrote diaries, but published sophisticated histories rooted in a Christian cultural nationalism with broad rhetorical appeal. The most influential of these texts was the Rev. Samuel Johnson’s 684 page History of the Yoruba, completed in 1901 and published in 1921. According to Peel, Johnson created with his narrative a modern sense of Yoruba nationhood.

Johnson was only one of...